that was a line of demarcation, the debt ceiling fight. our numbers were as bad as they were throughout the whole president's. -- presidency. the creditors and washington were swirling around. all folks were nervous. and it was clear that we were now in a situation where we had to fight and we had to pull out of the nose dive we were in. but the mechanism was already -- there were mechanical things that had to be done. one thing we do is they were going to have a big primary and we would have time to put things in motion while they were busy that would ultimately redound to our benefit. >> take me through when you guys started operationally -- part of it is just, what you have to start the things to build the programs? >> i was at a dnc for 2009-2010 support of the work was building the foundation of what we knew would come for the reelection. while it was not a permanent campaign, there were a lot of things under the radar, the analytics. building on some of the internal polling that we did, really holding the 50 states strategy and havin